nRF52840-dongle serial terminal

[Jerry Easley]

I have an application that runs on the nRF5280-dongle and I want to monitor the stream produced by some imbedded printf statements.  When application runs on my nRF52840 DK it works fine and I can monitor the serial terminal traffic within VSCODE with no issues.  The nRF52840-dongle is  a different animal.  Because it lacks debugging hardware VSCODE apparently cannot detect it and so I have to program it with Nordic's standalone programmer and which works well enough.  But when I try to monitor the serial port with the standalone emulator, it cannot find the COM port.  When I reset the dongle COM5 appears in my device manager and the programmer sees it and can connect to it.  When the programming process is complete the COM port disappears from the device manager and I cannot connect to it with the terminal emulator.

Is there a way to monitor a serial terminal on a nRF52840-dongle?  If so how do you do it?

[Priyanka]

Hi Jerry,

Yes in order to program the dongle you need an external debugger. You can probably use any nRF DKs for this purpose. Did you do this?

There is the Dongle programming tutorial which can help, perhaps.

Can your VSCode not detect any boards, or just the dongle?

Best Regards,

Priyanka

[Jerry Easley]

Hi Priyanka,

I don't have an external debugger but I do have a nRF52480-DK that I do my debugging on.  I used Nordic's nRF-Connect-for-desktop->Programmer to flash the dongle; It comes up and runs correctly, but in my code I have some printk statements that I would like to monitor on a terminal emulator (Putty).  This may not be possible, if not, the fix is simple enough; just a little extra hardware.

If you don't want to spend anymore time on this issue, just go ahead and close it; I happy with your answer.

Regards,

Jerry

[Priyanka]

Hi Jerry,

It's true, the options are limited for the dongle. But please do take a look at this ticket. Maybe it can be of use.

-Priyanka